219

Word-Spotting approach using transfer

deep learning of a CNN network
Ryma Benabdelaziz Djamel Gaceb Mohammed Haddad
Computer Science, Modeling, Computer Science, Modeling, Lab LIRIS, UMR CNRS 5205,
Optimization, and Electronic Systems Optimization, and Electronic Systems University of Claude Bernard Lyon 1
Laboratory (LIMOSE), UMBB Laboratory (LIMOSE), UMBB F-69622, Villeurbanne, France
Boumerdes,Algeria Boumerdes, Algeria mohammed.haddad@univ-lyon1.fr
r.benabdelaziz@univ-boumerdes.dz d.gaceb@univ-boumerdes.dz

Abstract— Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are
deep learning models that are trained to automatically extract
the most discriminating features directly from an input image
to be used for visual classification tasks. Recently, CNNs
attracted a lot of interest thanks to their effectiveness in many
computer vision applications (medical imaging, video
surveillance, biometrics, pattern recognition, OCR, etc.).
Transfer learning is an optimization method that uses a pre-
trained network to speed up the training of another related
task or application. This helps speed up and improve the
training process on a new dataset. In this paper, we propose a
new approach of handwritten word retrieval based on deep
learning and transfer learning. We compared the performance
between two types of extracted features based on transfer
learning: from a pre-trained model and a fine-tuned network.
Experiments are performed using six different CNN
architectures and three similarity measures on the pre-
segmented Bentham dataset of the ICDAR competition. The
obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed
approach compared to existing methods, evaluated in this
competition.
Keywords— CNN, Deep and Transfer Learning, Word
Spotting, Word Retrieval, Features Extraction, Similarity
Distances.
I. INTRODUCTION
For natural images, especially document images, image
retrieval is one of the most active topics in the artificial
vision community. Technological advances have made it
possible to implement a variety of techniques that facilitate
and accelerate the navigation and retrieval of important
information in a large corpus of scanned documents.
Nowadays, word spotting techniques are faced with new
challenges due to the ever-increasing complexity of
documents. Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is a
retrieval technique designed to retrieve images from a huge
image database. This type of technique is based on
computing the similarity between visual features (texture,
color, and shape). The CBIR techniques are suitable for
global search between natural images, but not for partial
retrieval of local information contained in an image, and
hence not suitable for word-level retrieval in document
images. In order to achieve this, other systems more adapted
to this type of application are proposed. These systems are
called Document Image Retrieval System (DIRS). DIRS
systems can be split into two categories: recognition-based
techniques (manual or automatic) and word spotting
techniques. On the one hand, recognition-based techniques
are deemed to be accurate and more suitable for recent
handwriting and high quality printed/handwritten
documents. However, these techniques are not effective
when applied to ancient and degraded documents.
Furthermore, the latter methods are usually limited to one
language making handwriting recognition systems for
old/damaged documents or documents with rare languages
not straightforward and hard to conceive. On the other hand,
word-spotting techniques are further convenient for this type
of documents especially techniques based on feature
extraction. Nowadays, the current trend in computer vision
is related to applications based on deep neural networks.
Deep learning is a collection of machine learning algorithms
used to characterize advanced abstractions or functions.
Deep learning models are built hierarchically in different
levels (layers). Usually, models will encode low-level
features in their first layers and abstract these features to
higher-level ones on subsequent layers. Most recently, the
light was shed on different deep learning architectures that
have demonstrated their effectiveness such as Convolutional
Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory
(LSTM), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Deep Belief
Network (DBN), Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), Auto-
Encoder (AE), to name a few. A detailed review of deep
learning architectures is presented in [1].
In this article, we study the robustness of CNN networks
in the context of handwritten word retrieval (using a visual
query) in a large corpus of document images. In particular,
we investigate the effectiveness of transfer learning by
observing its impact on different CNN architectures. We
compare the retrieval efficiency between models pre-trained
on natural images and model re-trained using a reduced
dataset of handwritten images. Our experiments were
performed on the Bentham dataset used in the ICDAR
Competition [2] for handwritten word spotting. This dataset
is complex and establishes several scientific challenges,
degradation, and irregularities in the handwriting. The
dataset includes old, degraded and deformed handwritten
word images with different sizes, inclination degrees,
resolutions, styles, ink visibilities, and qualities. In addition,
due to the lack of techniques focusing on ancient manuscript
images, this competition is one of the few initiatives we can
leverage to evaluate our results with other approaches using
the same benchmarking dataset.
The remainder of the article is organized as follows. In
the second section, we present a literature review of existing
word spotting techniques. Additionally, we give details
related to CNNs, their architectures and the different word
spotting approaches based on CNNs. In section three, we
present the methodology of our word spotting approach and
its implementation. This is followed in section four by a
description of our experimental setup and our evaluation
results. Finally, we draw our conclusions and set future
challenges.

978-1-7281-5835-8/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE

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II. RELATED WORKS
A. Word spotting techniques
Characters and word recognition techniques are not often
suitable for word retrieval systems, especially for
handwritten documents. Retrieval approaches have been
proposed to overcome these issues by using methods called
word/keyword spotting techniques. The latter can be
separated into two families: techniques based on a textual
query (QBS: Query By String) and techniques using an
image as a query (QBE: Query By Example). In this article,
we focused on QBE approaches. Further, we can distinguish
between these techniques using multiple criteria: with or
without using learning (learning or learning-free), in
addition to using or not using segmentation (segmentation-
based and segmentation-free approaches). Word spotting is
a new trend that was first proposed by the speech
recognition community [3], then propagated to computer
vision. In the literature, many works addressed this context
and have been used in various applications.
Several QBE works have been proposed [4] [5] [6] [7],
but the problem with these kinds of approaches is that a
query image (image) needs to be inserted by the user, and
which must necessarily be present in the collection. This has
pushed to develop techniques that do not require a query
sample, which are called QBS. This family uses Supervised
and Unsupervised learning that usually includes the
construction of the query or word models. In this context,
we have found various works. The authors of [8] [9]
introduced several improvements with a supervised learning
stage such as probabilistic or statistical classifiers (HMM),
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), Support Vector
Machines (SVM), etc. Or in unsupervised learning, which
uses, for example, the Bag Of Visuals Words (BOVW) [10].
Several approaches for word spotting including the QBE
and QBS methods have relied on extracting different
features such as Gabor features [11], Histogram of Oriented
Gradient Features (HOG) [12], texture descriptors [13],
SIFT [14], SURF [15], structure or shape descriptors such as
Fourier transform [16], skeletons based features [17],
moments: Hu moments [18], Zernike moments [19], Radial
moments [20], etc. Other approaches attempted to combine
multiscale features for word images such as the work done
in [21].
B. Convolutional Neural Networks architectures
The CNN model was initially proposed in 1990, but it
only demonstrated its full potential recently by achieving the
state-of-the-art classification performance on the ImageNet
dataset. ImageNet is a large image database containing 14
million of natural images organized in 1000 categories. It
was designed by academics and dedicated to computer
vision research. It was used to train many CNN
architectures. Since their creation, CNNs have undergone
multiple improvements (implementation optimization,
parameters adjustment, architecture modification, etc.). The
CNN architecture restructuring is one of the most important
changes as it helps increasing efficiency. This usually
involves depth (adding new layers) and space exploitation.
According to the architectural changes, CNNs have been
divided into seven categories such as: Spatial exploitation
(AlexNet [22], GoogleNet [23], VGG [24]), Depth (Resnet
[25], Inception V3 / V4, inceptionResnet [26]), multi-path
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220
(Resnet [25], DensNet [27]), Width (PyramidalNet [28],
Xception [29]), Exploiting feature maps (squeeze and
excitation [30]), Channel boosting (CNN Boosted channel
using TL [31]), and Attention-based CNNs (Convolutional
block attention [32]).
The CNN training strength comes down to multiple steps
in extracting features through hidden layers that can learn
representations from data. CNNs are considered as very
powerful image processing techniques that took the
attention of many large companies (Google, Microsoft, etc.)
and demonstrated outstanding performance in several
machine-learning tasks: segmentation, object detection, and
recognition, retrieval, regression, classification, etc. CNNs
have three different types of layers: (a) convolutional layer,
(b) non-linear processing units, and (c) sub-sampling layers.
Different transformations have been made on the CNN
technique such as the application of convolution operations
using kernels (filters). In the first group (convolutional
layers), the images are divided into small parts that will
participate in the locales feature extraction stage. The
outputs of these convolutional layers are directly related to
the second group, Non-linear processing layers. Which
allows learning abstractions and additionally introduces
Non-linearity in the feature space. Non-linearity helps to
learn different image semantics. The Non-linear group is
connected to the sub-sampling layers, which summarizes the
results of the previous layer and makes the input invariant to
different geometric distortions. CNNs are structured by a
successive stacking of convolutional and pooling layers and
then aggregated by a single or multiple densely connected
layers, which are replaced in some applications by global
average pooling. In addition to learning layers, the
architecture of a CNN also includes normalization
functionality and dropouts that are intended for optimization
and performance improvements.
Although this technique was very effective in many
fields, we could only find very few word spotting related
works based on CNNs. The authors of [33] propose a
segmentation-based word spotting technique in which a
CNN was trained on a proposed Pyramidal Histogram Of
Characters (PHOC). To test their technique, the authors
have used four databases: George Washington manuscripts,
IAM, Esposalles database, IFN / ENIT. In the literature, we
can find multiple extensions of the PHOC technique such as
[34] [35]. In [35], the authors propose an approach inspired
by this last technique [33] to implement a free-segmentation
word spotting technique. They defined their proper layer
based on Regions of Interest (ROI) of the input document
image. The pooling ROIs allowing pooling features over
candidate word regions. They also activate the same layer at
the end (Sigmoid). The authors of [36] propose a technique
to analyze handwritten historical document images and use
CNNs to learn the word descriptors and word similarity
between word descriptors. The authors combined a deep
learning classification and regression tasks to increase the
performance of the word retrieval system.
III. METHODOLOGY
Some of the advantages of deep neural networks are the
fact they can be reused fully or partially to speed up the
training and enhance the performance of a model on a new
related problem. Transfer learning is the process of reusing
the knowledge (features, weights, etc.) of a pre-trained

Tranfer deep learning step
Pre-trained network Fine-tuned network
Large Dataset Small Dataset
(ImageNet)
(Query Images)
Fine-tuning
Train
Train
Pre-trained
weights Knewledge
Frozen Fine-tuned
weights weights
(1) Features extraction (2) Features extraction
from CB output Using partially fine-tuned CB
Fig. 1. A synoptic diagram of our proposed word spotting technique using
a description based on transfer deep learning.
model for training newer models on a new task. This
approach is currently very popular in deep learning because
it can be used to train deep neural networks with relatively
little data. Our proposed approach is mainly based on CNNs
using transfer learning for word spotting applications. It
consists of three stages: transfer learning (pre-training/fine-
tuning), word image description and matching (see the
synoptic diagram of Fig. 1).
A. Transfer learning
The existing datasets for the evaluation of word-spotting
approaches are small and insufficient for achieving good
generalization for deep learning techniques. Reusing a
trained model based on transfer learning represents a better
approach to avoid this limitation. It allows us to not only
reduce the need to depend on a large dataset but also uses
high-performance models to respond to the different
constraints associated with our word-spotting application
(large variability of handwritten words, deformations, ink
variation, degradation, etc.). This is translated in deep
learning by the usage of a single or multiple layers extracted
from a previously trained model to a new model. In our
approach, we propose and compare two ways of extracting
features from handwritten word images using transfer
learning, through a pre-trained network or a fine-tuned
network. In both directions, the original (initial) CNN model
is pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset.
1) Feature extraction using a pre-trained network
The feature extraction from a pre-trained network is a
transfer learning which allows the use of resulting features
from the pre-trained database initially designed to predict
classes. The architecture of a deep network is composed of
two complementary parts. The first one includes a sequence
of convolutional layers and pooling called convolutional
base (CB). The second is based on the densely or fully
connected (FC) layers, called a classifier. The extracted
features, used here, are based on the convolution base output
flattening in a pre-trained network. The reason for this
choice is that the description learned by the convolutional
base is likely to be more generic and therefore more
reusable. However, the image description learned by the
classifier will necessarily be specific to the set of classes on
which the original model was trained on (adapted to the
ImageNet and not to the ICDAR dataset). The feature
extraction requires loading a suited model then removing the
top layer and preserving the convolutional base. At this
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Word image description step
Test Dataset
(Word Image)
Queries + candidates
Query word
Candidate word
Features extraction using pretrained
or fine-tuned network
Matching step
Using distance metric
221
stage, the model is considered as a visual features’ extractor.
To extract the final descriptors’ vector, we flatten the output
of the last convolutional block (MaxPolling layer) of the
pre-trained model.
2) Feature extraction using a fine-tuned network
Transfer learning is applied in fine-tuned networks when
the new dataset is smaller than the first dataset but with
different particular characteristics. Here, the fine-tuning
consists of re-training the pre-trained model (trained initially
on the ImageNet dataset, composed of natural images) on a
new dataset of the ICDAR contest (composed of
handwritten word images collected from old scanned
documents) which has a different nature (textual) and a
smaller size with different elements (words) to classify.
Because the number of classes is different in the new
dataset, the fine-tuned network needs to adapt the layers of
the second network part (classifier) to recognize the new
word classes. First, we remove the second part (the FC
layers) of an existing network. Afterward, we add a new
adapted set of FC layers on top of the CNN (by changing the
size of the Softmax layer, which corresponds, to the number
of classes of the new dataset). We then fine-tune its weights
on the new dataset. Thereafter, the weights of the CB last
layers are partially or fully fine-tuned. The first layers of the
CB can be frozen to take advantage of the model’s generic
knowledge already acquired during the initial training on a
large dataset and accelerate the re-training process on the
new dataset. The level of genericity or reusability of an
image description constructed by a specific layer depends on
its depth in the relative model. The first layers of a model
usually encode low-level features whereas top-level layer
encodes higher-level features. The presence of differences
between the new and initial datasets leads us to freeze (fix) a
large part of the first layers of the CB and avoiding freezing
all the remaining layers. Therefore, several layers of the
initial model will be reused to re-train the new one (some
weights of the first model will be adapted to train the second
one). The resulting network is thus considered as a visual
features’ extractor using the flattened CB output
(MaxPolling layer). The difference is that in the fine-tuned
network, we retrain our new model using the query images
(some weights of the original model will be changed and
adjusted to this new data). Next, we ensure that the new
network can extract features related to our context (query
dataset).
To evaluate our method, we used the proposed queries
set of the Bentham dataset used in the ICDAR15 word
spotting contest, which consists of 95 query word images
each containing 2 to 5 samples (20 different words) and
3233 tests images. For our experiments, we divided the
query dataset into image samples (which represents the
same word) and added a 21st sample. In this last class, we
added a sample of different words extracted from the
Bentham candidate dataset. We note that the 21st sample
does not include any query word of the 20 classes in the aim
to distinguish between query images and the rest of the
images to improve the similarity measurements. We have
carried out two tests: the first one evaluates the word
spotting using a pre-trained network (with ImageNet
weights) (see Fig. 4.a), the second one introduces fine-
tuning to see the influence of transfer learning in performing
word retrieval using three similarity measures for the feature
vectors (see Fig. 4.b).

Fig. 2. Example of VGG16 network architecture using new dataset.
We have evaluated our technique on six CNN
architectures (VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, ResNet,
Resnet-InceptionV2, Xception). See the example of VGG16
network in (Fig. 2).
In our experiments, we used feature vectors of size M,
this size depends on the used CNN architecture (M=25088
in VGG16 model).
B. Word image description using Pre-trained/Fine-tuned
networks
This step consists of computing the feature vectors of
each image. Query images and candidate images are passed
through the pre-trained/fine-tuned network. Several
operations are applied on each pixel using the weights of the
pre-trained/fine-tuned network. The descriptor vector of each
image is generated and used in the next step of word image
matching.
C. Matching step
In this last step, we carry out matching between query
images and candidate images by computing the distance
between their resulting features vectors. We have compared
in our matching step three types of distances, to measure the
pairwise similarities between two features vectors, which
correspond to the query and candidate images vectors (see
results in the following section).
-Euclidian distance: ED (P , Q ) =
¦ i =1 (Pi − Q i )2
M
§ (P − Q )2
-Chi2 distance:
¦i =1 ¨¨ Pi i+ Qi i+ ε ¸¸
M
CH 2( P, Q) =
© ¹
-Kullback-Leibler Divergence:
KL (P, Q ) = ¦i=1 (Pi × log 2 (Pi )) − (Pi × log 2 (Qi ))
M k =1
In which P and Q are two vectors of the same size (M),
P=P+ and Q=Q+  in the third equation.
IV. TESTS AND EXPERIMENTATION
A. Bentham Dataset
The performance of our proposed approach is evaluated
following the same evaluation protocol used in the
ICDAR15 competition on Keyword Spotting for
Handwritten Documents [2] and the same image datasets.
This dataset comprises pre-segmented word images acquired
from 10 handwritten pages written by the British
philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and his secretary.
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222
Fig. 3. (a) Example of Bantham dataset document image, (b) Handwriting
irregularities in segmented word extracted from Bantham dataset.
This dataset consists of 3233 candidate images and 95 query
images. In addition, several authors participated in the
writing of these words; hence, the words are of different
font sizes, styles, and present artifacts, defects, and
irregularities (Fig. 3).
Finally, in the matching step, each query image is
matched to all candidate images. The resulted list is sorted
in ascending order according to the similarity values of the
best corresponding images. We coded our approach using
Python and the deep learning models were implanted using
the Keras deep learning library. The tests were carried out
on a machine with processor Intel ® Core i7-7700HQ with
16GB of RAM and using an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070
with 8GB of VRAM.
B. Evaluation Metric
In order to test and evaluate our word spotting technique,
we used the Mean Average Precision metric, which is
commonly used in such approaches. The mAP is computed
as follows: the evaluation script computes the (interpolated)
average precision for each query image in the set Q, using
the (interpolated) precision at-top-k, (k) (’(k)) and the
recall-at-top-k, (k). Equation 4, outlines the (interpolated)
precision and recall scores of the top-k responses, using the
set of all relevant items R, and the set of top-k results in the
solution S(k). Which allows computing the interpolated
average precision AP (where (k) is the difference in recall
between items k and k1), and denes the mAP metric, from
the AP of each query q, AP(q)) [2].
(1)
· R ∩ S (k ) R ∩ S (k )
(2) π (k ) = ; ρ (k) = ; π '(k) = max (j)
j:ρ (j)≥ ρ (k)
S (k ) R
n
1
AP = ¦π '(k) ⋅Δρ (k); mAP = ¦ AP(q)
Q
q∈Q
(3) (4)
C. Results and discussion
According to the experimental results, our approach is
based on fine-tuned network and Kullback-Leibler distance
(see Table 1) has yielded a better precision compared to
existing approaches presented in [5][37][38][39] as well as
our previous training-free word spotting method [40]. In
Table 1, we compare our results with the top 2 techniques of
segmentation-based word spotting (Track I. A- PRG group
[39], and CVC group [38]) and the other three approaches
[5][37][40] evaluated in the Bentham dataset and using the
same evaluation protocol of the ICDAR15 competition.
The Top 1 method of competition is proposed by the
PRG group [39] which began with the feature extraction
step using the SIFT technique, and then have used these

mAP on Pre-trained CNN architectures
RESNET-INCEPTION V2
XCEPTION
INCEPTION V3
RESNET50
VGG19
VGG16
0 0,1 0,2 0,3
Kullback-Leibler Divergence Chi2 distance
(a)
mAP on Re-trained CNN architectures
RESNET-INCEPTION V2
XCEPTION
INCEPTION V3
RESNET50
VGG19
VGG16
0 0,1 0,2 0,3
Kullback-Leibler Divergence Chi2 distance
(b)
Fig. 4. mAP using three different distances on pre-trained and re-trained
(fine-tuned) CNN architectures.
features to construct a codebook. Group 2 is the CVC [38]
which has used the integral histograms of oriented gradients
(IHOG) technique and then creates a bag of visual words.
We have also compared our results with our previous
training-free word-spotting technique [40]. Our previous
technique is based on textural local features extracted from
handwriting, and original matching step using the KNN
technique in a spatial context.
The comparison of the two transfer learning approaches
shows that the results of the fine-tuned network give a better
precision compared to the direct re-use of a pre-trained
network on a general dataset like ImageNet. All these results
are proof that transfer learning can help to develop and
accelerate word-spotting applications without using large
word-image datasets. The histograms in Fig 4.a and 4.b
compare the accuracy of six deep learning architectures in
two contexts (pre-trained and fine-tuned models) using three
different distance metrics. This comparison shows that the
VGG architecture is more efficient and adapted to such a
network refinement approach on a small specific dataset.
This demonstrates that the features resulting from the fine-
tuned model are more relevant to distinguish handwritten
words and that learning on ImageNet only is insufficient and
does not offer the needed genericity to process textual
images. We notice that all images samples corresponding to
each query images are to some extent similar to the style the
queries writing. The difference can be observed is in the
writing slant, size of characters, ink visibility.
Thus, we found that a small set of query samples are
enough to train the CNN models, which allows retrieving
many similar samples in a large dataset. We argue that this
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223
TABLE I. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS FOR SEGMENTATION-BASED IN
BENTHAM DATASET OF THE ICDAR15 COMPETITION.
Mean average
Methods
precision (mAP)
Best result using fine-tuned VGG16 and
0.634
Kullback-Leibler distance
Our previous learning-free word spotting technique
0.578
[40]
Best result using pre-training VGG19 and Chi2
0,556
distance
Zagoris’s method using a dynamic window [6] 0.440
0,4 0,5 0,6 PRG group method [39] 0.424
Euclidienne distance
CVC group (Ghosh & Valveny, 2015) [38] 0.300
CSPD method [37] 0.193
small sample set of query images can be formed using only
a query image (without searching exemplary in the dataset
to train the model), we can do this for example, by making
changes in the query image scale, slant, skew, rotation
degrees, etc.
V. CONCLUSION
Through this paper, we presented a new word spotting
technique that relies on transfer learning from a pre-trained
0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7
convolutional neural network to extract visual features and a
Euclidienne distance
similarity measurement technique to achieve accurate
Query-By-Example word spotting. We compared between
using CNN on pre-trained networks on natural images
(ImageNet) and with the same networks but using transfer
learning from a small dataset of pre-classified word images.
The visual features extracted from both types of approaches
were used to perform the retrieval on a word spotting dataset
used within the ICDAR15 conference. We carried out tests
on six different CNN architectures using three different
distance metrics. Despite the complexity of the handwriting,
deep CNNs can perform word-spotting tasks and can
effectively be tuned using transfer learning. This work
pushes us to see further, to test in the future other datasets
and administrative document components such as stamps,
signatures, logo, etc.
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